April 06, 2009 -- The Storage Networking World (SNW) conference is under way and the InfoStor team is in Orlando to keep you up-to-date on news and announcements from the show.

A few product announcements trickled out of SNW this morning, including FalconStor Software’s release of the Backup Accelerator option for its Virtual Tape Library (VTL) product, 3PAR’s launch of a quad-controller storage array for midrange customers, the debut of cloud storage services startup Zetta, and the availability of Netgear’s newest NAS/unified storage system with a cloud storage option for SMBs.

Speaking of the cloud – and that’s all we seem to be speaking about lately – the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) today announced the creation of the Cloud Storage Technical Work Group (TWG) aimed at developing SNIA Architectures and best practices related to cloud storage technology. The initial TWG charter includes the focus to produce a set of specifications and to drive the consistency of interface standards across the various cloud storage related efforts.

The Cloud Storage TWG is also soliciting proposals for standard interfaces and is looking to engage vendors and other “Cloud industry parties” in its efforts. The group plans to release a reference model for Cloud Storage with associated terminology definitions to aid in further work on the standards. Cloud service and storage interface definitions are expected in draft form later this year and anticipated to be adopted starting in 2010.

The SNIA is also refocusing its efforts on the IP storage front. The Association announced an expansion in the charter of the SNIA IP Storage Forum, which is reflected in its new name – the SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum (ESF). The EFS has been tasked with driving the broad adoption of all Ethernet–connected storage networking solutions.

The ESF will consist of two Special Interest Groups - the iSCSI SIG and the NFS SIG. The iSCSI SIG will focus on continuing the IP Storage Forum agenda to evangelize the benefits and best practices related to iSCSI. Member companies include Compellent, Dell, HP, Intel, Microsoft, NEC, NetApp and Sun.

The new NFS SIG will be focused on NFS-based NAS solutions, particularly emerging technologies, such as pNFS. The founding members of the NFS SIG include EMC, NetApp, Panasas and Sun.

Additionally, the group also plans to form a Special Interest Group focused on the CIFS/SMB protocol and ecosystem.

Hifn made news with the launch of its BitWackr 250 and 255, which are aimed at server OEMs, Microsoft Partners and white-box server builders looking to add hardware-assisted data de-duplication and compression with thin provisioning to Windows Servers.

According to Hifn, BitWackr provides real-time, in-line de-dupe and compression, reducing the amount of data written to disk. The cards combine the company’s BitWackr block-based de-dupe software with a Hifn Express DR 250 PCI-x or 255 PCIe card that employs specialized hardware to perform data compression and de-dupe hashing operations.

The BitWackr 250 and 255 products are priced at $995 with general availability slated for the third quarter of this year.

InfoStor’sEditor-in-Chief, Dave Simpson, and I will be blogging/reporting from the conference all this week. Check out the Infostor homepage for the latest industry news & analysis from SNW Orlando. There is some news from Symantec on the horizon and Brocade has called a press conference for tomorrow afternoon. Stay tuned…

Kevin Komiega has been the Senior Editor of InfoStor since 2005. He was previously a senior news writer with SearchStorage.com and held a position as a public relations account executive with Porter Novelli, Boston. Kevin also spent four years running tape backup operations at the University of Rhode Island's Academic Computer Center. He can be contacted at kkomiega@quinstreet.com.

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